DHL Global Forwarding - Sales Support Team of the Year

Company: DHL Global Forwarding, Miami, FLCompany Description: DHL Global Forwarding is part of Deutsche Post DHL Group, with headquarters in Bonn, Germany. Founded in 1815, DHL Global Forwarding celebrated 200 years last year and is committed to providing simplified, sustainable and integrated logistics solutions to cover our customer's supply chain needs throughout the world.Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team CategoriesNomination Sub Category: Sales Support Team of the Year

Nomination Title: DHL Global Forwarding U.S. Sales Support Team is on fire!

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2015 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

DHL Global Forwarding’s U.S. sales force is one of company’s largest with 250+ sales professionals. The U.S. Sales Support Team has six sub-functions: Performance Management; Sales Operations/Support; RFQ Management Team; Customer Relationship Management; Marketing; and Data & Tools Management.

The U.S. Sales Support Team established “The 5 Star Way,” focused on Quality, Productivity, Reliability, Results and Service. Their vision is to lead the way through thought-leadership in Sales Support and Sales Operations, with demonstrated success in these areas:

• Enabled improvement in Sales Performance with over twenty “Sales KPI Clinics” resulting in Country Sales INDEX score increasing from 78 to 90%, which made USA #1 globally for Tier 1 countries; recognized as a global best practice. Migrated over 1,200 customers in 45 days to new IT Platform with introduction of smart interactive analytical reporting. Thus reducing cost to make it a free service to brick wall customers, a differentiator for winning new business. Revamped Sales Commission which delivered 13% Air Freight volume growth compared to prior year. Enabled improvement in overall sales effectiveness from 87% in December 2015 to 92% in September 2016.

• The U.S. Bid Team is out-performing expectations, with 13% more bids won and value 64% higher. YTD: largest win was €25m vs. €5m previous year whilst being above target hit rate. Revamped the RFQ submissions with innovative and green online eDocs, easy to read magazine like tender documents and reduced bid submission time from 16 to 9 days. Introduced various best practices which have been implemented in DHL Americas, Europe and Asia.

• Conceptualized and implemented Station Readiness Scorecard in Sales Operations, which measures how ready the Operational terminals are to take on significant growth. Readiness KPIs include Pricing, Network Engagement, Customer Onboarding and Service Delivery. Tangible readiness measure instilled higher confidence in the global network to drive U.S. business. Customer implementation drive increased implementation by 13%, with a 15% increase in volumes shipped as compared to customer commitment.

• Sales Support function exceeded Global expectations by far with 8: 1 front to back office ratio, vs. 4: 1 guidelines, and with more scope of works than expected. With ISO certifiable work instructions, the team leveraged DHL Americas Shared Service Center reducing direct operating expenses (DOE) from €540,000 to €150,000 annually. The team goes the extra mile by helping Customer Service and Operations in stations, providing interim program management for five of the top 100 global DHL customers.

• The CRM & Marketing team generated leads for 230 high value targets worth €122m of potential which resulted in Sales teams winning new business valued over €26m. Data quality has been consistently high at 98% for the last 18 months and is #1 across all countries in Americas, which is significant considering the size of the U.S. data volume. A record 54 Customer events were managed resulting in €30m business opportunities of which €8.5m won. Also, the team secured the key note speaker spot for DPDHL Global CEO Dr. Frank Appel at the 2016 Trans-Pacific Maritime Conference.

• The team boasts World Class Employee Opinion Survey scores (EOS) in Team Work, Communication, Learning & Development and Performance Enablement Index. Scoring near perfect with 98 out of 100 in Active Leadership, Job Fulfillment and Career Development. This is exemplified with individual career progressions such as Sales Support Manager being promoted to Station Manager and Sales Support Specialists promoted to Field Sales and Trade Lane Sales. The team continues to facilitate higher levels of knowledge transfer, positive career planning and personal developments.

The support provided by the team to improve U.S. Sales team effectiveness resulted in DHL being recognized again by Selling Power magazine’s “50 Best Companies to Sell For,” with a rank move up from 16 to 15 for 2016. U.S. Sales Support also won the DHL Global Award for “Outstanding Contribution to Sales” in April 2016 and chosen by DHL head office for further study as a model structure.